Innovation systems, triple helix, and similar expressions, are used to conceptualise the growing need for more integrated forms of co-operation between academia and other societal actors, such as governmental agencies and industry, in order to produce knowledge relevant for society. However, there is as yet little reported experience from such recent and on-going co-operative projects of how research changes when it becomes involved in practices it is meant to contribute to. In this paper, the authors report about three different research projects where researchers co-operated with governmental agencies and industry around the development of ICT. Evidence from three domains, namely e-government, telecommunications and welfare services, indicates the need for problematising current mainstream understandings of innovation. Innovation, as we see it, is occurring through configurations of designers, developers and domain experts that form constituencies and where scientific knowledge is confronted by requirements, constraints and possibilities of the specific situation. In this context innovation of, or involving, ICT requires a significant amount of imagination, represents a relatively sharp break with established ways of doing things, and requires artful integration of different professional practices, communities, and technologies. We define these creative processes of co-development of work practices, organisations and technology as situated innovation.

Co-operation between research and industry and society, and the notion of innovation systems, are high on the agenda of national as well as international research politics. However, how to make co-operation between researchers and practitioners work, and what kind of research results could come out of such co-operation, is hardly discussed. The article uses evidence from three projects in the areas e-government and telecommunication to reflect on such co-operation. Scientific understanding and practices of design, development and use of ICT challenge and inform each other in these co-operative projects, which we have started to refer to as ‘situated innovation’. The article discusses the role of the researcher in such contexts, the character of the research results, and means to co-ordinate different rhythms and rationales in order to make research and practices of ICT development and use mutually enhancing.

In this short paper, we present glimpses from an interdisciplinary research and development project aimed at enhancing local democracy by developing ICT support for the consultation process around the comprehensive plan of a municipality. For the participating researchers, the project offered the opportunity of combining and comparing approaches and methods from two different design traditions that share democratic ideals and ambitions of nurturing citizen/user participation in design processes. This proved to be more challenging than we had originally anticipated. Differences in perspective gave different interpretations of the design context as well as of how participatory the processes actually were.

This article describes a non-traditional approach to Participatory Design where distributed users have a serious impact on a software development process. The small software provider makes use of a non-traditional way of Participatory Design combined with an agile development approach. By using for among other things support service, user meetings, courses and news letter they are able to on a daily bases keep in contact with users. Users convey requirements for new functionalities, give feedback and report errors. Users’ feedback and proposals form the base for further development. Frequent re-leases allow the company to quickly implement improvements and bug-fixes. The article relates the observed practices to other research on Participatory Design in unconventional settings and discusses how to expand the Participatory Design toolbox.

Collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. This article presents an exploratory study of the factors for successful collaboration between industry and academia in software research.